Monthly Archives: August 2019

News of the Moment

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֎ Did the reader see Apple’s new ad selling an Apple credit card that “doesn’t need a bank”? Cryptocurrency is here to stay.

֎ Did the reader read that Jakarta, a city larger than New York by 2 million residents and is the capital of Indonesia, is sinking into the Java Sea? So they are building a brand new city from scratch on the island of Borneo. The downside is that it will house only 1.5 million residents – mostly government workers. Other nations should watch and learn how to do this so that when their home town sinks below the waves, they’ll know what to do.

֎ Mariner surmises that PBS news must read his blog. On Wednesday night’s broadcast they covered a children’s program in Oakland, California where a group of children are taken to a nature park on a regular basis. The program leaders believe that being outside (and not on a sidewalk leashed to a parent’s hand, is good for the general health of the children. One of the leaders had a good tag line: “You can’t click anything in nature.” (see mariner’s “The Child Park” published August 19)

֎ From Dave Chappell’s new Netflix show: “I want to see if you can guess who it is I’m doing an impression of.” He adopts a Homer Simpson–like tone and flails his arms: “Uh, duh. Hey! Durr! If you do anything wrong in your life—duh!—and I find out about it, I’m gonna try to take everything away from you!” Chappelle whines. “And I don’t care what I find out! Could be today, tomorrow, 15, 20 years from now. If I find out, you’re fucking—duh!—finished.” The audience doesn’t have much time to guess which dullard Chappelle is imitating, as he reveals the answer almost immediately: “That’s you!”

֎ Hazrat Inayat Khan appeared on the Zen daily calendar today saying “There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul. A total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.” He died in 1927. How did he know what it would be like in 2019?

֎ The Tongass National Forest in Alaska spans nearly 17 million acres, and its wilderness of old-growth cedar, spruce and hemlock trees makes up the world’s largest temperate rainforest. President Trump is pushing his agriculture secretary to lift logging restrictions in this cool-temperature preserve.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

About Labor Unions

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Labor unions have been on the decline for several decades. Conservative politicians, businesses and lawsuits limiting union financing are the primary causes. Even more specific, the Internet and advancing technology have changed both the workplace and the treatment of payroll making it a finite overhead that does not flex with profit.

The union model, in place since the start of unions at the beginning of the twentieth century, is corporate-specific; the union is a unit of a specific business and is subject to the condition of that business. Some unions were able to merge with other unions in the same market, e.g., steel, carpentry, autoworkers, truckers, steamfitters, etc. Service unions, e.g., hotel workers and shipping also merged to be a generic force across several businesses. Government unions have survived in democratic states but have been throttled in republican states. A precedent was set at the Federal level when Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union. The following paragraphs succinctly describe the union situation:

[U.S. Labor Unions By Jordan Yadoo]

The Situation

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court found that states cannot require public employees who opt out of union membership to nonetheless help pay for collective bargaining undertaken on their behalf. The court had deadlocked over a similar case in 2016. The decision is expected to reduce the funds unions use to support their members and expand recruitment efforts. And it is likely to cut into their political power, since they’ll have less to spend supporting (mostly Democratic) candidates. The court’s decision was another blow to a system that’s been in decline for years. In 2017, just 10.7 percent of wage and salary workers in the U.S. belonged to a union; almost half the rate in 1983. So-called right-to-work laws, which ban any requirement for employees to pay union dues or fees, are already in place in more than half the states, including the traditional union strongholds of Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin. In the public sector, where the membership rate has hovered at about 35 percent, unions were already feeling pressure to agree to pay, pension and health-care cuts. There have been a few bright spots: a string of recent successful unionization campaigns by journalists at the Los Angeles Times, Vox Media and MTV News, and a series of teacher strikes in states including West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Colorado that led to salary increases.

In 1935 the National Labor Relations Act codified workers’ rights to unionize and engage in collective bargaining. By the end of the Great Depression, unions grew in strength and number. When the AFL and CIO merged in 1955, more than 1 in 3 American workers had union jobs. But as the U.S. economy shifted from manufacturing to services, unions gradually lost ground. Workplace walkouts declined. From 1970 to 1980, there were an average of 280 work stoppages per year in the U.S. involving 1,000 workers or more; in 2017, there were 7.

Union workers earn about $200 more per week on average than non-union workers, and have better retirement pay and health insurance. Some economists link today’s wage stagnation, broadening income inequality and lack of economic mobility to the decline in unions.

As manufacturing dwindled, the economy depended more on the service industry (restaurants, hotels, transportation, white collar labor, government, etc.) as a significant working class contributor to GDP. The service business model was too eclectic to unionize easily. Most recently teachers and fast food workers have increased their political voices but legislation, business profit models and self-destructing ennui by workers make a recovery of unionization difficult.

Mariner often quotes Deming in his statement that a new paradigm cannot evolve from within the old paradigm. Boy, is that true today! The ‘Establishment’ has reached the end of the road as the entire world jumps into a different reality. This includes the union ‘Establishment.’

Guru suggests that the marriage between business and unions is over. The influence of the Internet and the ability to move whole companies from country to country without disruption eliminates the hold that a union may have on a stationary business operation – the business can just move elsewhere. What unions may evolve into is a guardian of worker wellbeing in general with no specific business relationship.

A good example that exists today is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The rights of free speech, among other Constitutional rights, is defended constantly not for just paying customers but for all citizens. Consider an American Worker Rights Union that is a constant presence between business practices and worker rights and wages. Another example is the National Organization for Women (NOW).

Mariner remembers his father (Labor Chaplin of Maryland) visiting different unions. They weren’t too far removed from social clubs except that the issues were quite important. Today, this is inefficient. The enemy is a freewheeling corporatism and a plutocratic government. The union defense is in changing legislation and protecting everyone who suffers from illegitimate wages and benefits.

Ancient Mariner

 

College, Economy and Jobs

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There are a few folks still alive who remember the small four-year college as a finishing school for social graces and intellectual elitism. Liberal Arts was the major purpose, refining ideals, philosophy and social insight. Of course there were more pragmatic subjects in the sciences, engineering, medicine and the like but most of these subjects required advanced degrees beyond the small liberal arts college.

Things changed after World War II. The GI Bill financed college for veterans. Slowly as the 1900s passed, social grace was displaced by the opportunity to have a better paying job; certainly the intellectual purpose still existed but people with four-year college degrees clearly had a better chance in life. At the end of the century things began to shift again.

The issue is the imbalance of the workforce. In the 1990s the economy expanded through investment opportunities rather than manufacturing. The number of manufacturing jobs dropped dramatically between 1997 and 2010 – to the tune of 5.7 million jobs. The net effect was that a college degree was the sole strategy for getting a better paying job; and colleges grew.

Further, by 2030 automation will reduce the number of all jobs by 73 million. While college degrees may be valid for a narrow group of post graduate studies, the four-year degree, at the moment, is not providing the better future it has promised in the past. Statisticians who follow these studies suggest far too many students are entering college than there are jobs to accommodate them.

The lack of trained labor employees that would be needed for a recovery of manufacturing has caught the attention of Congress. Conservatives already are looking for ways to redirect Federal funds that support four-year colleges in order to improve trade schools, community colleges and training offered by businesses.

Given the increased complexity of artificial intelligence and integrated computer processes, and robots of every description, a manufacturing job indeed needs more training and comprehension today than the old school, labor intensive environment. But Liberal Arts is not required.

What all this means for small liberal arts colleges is not good. Already dozens of colleges have had to revamp their majors to include service work like nursing, criminal justice, and business accounting. Still, too few students are registering for liberal arts majors. Today, there are too many service workers who have four-year degrees; the market for students is no longer growing. College mergers are frequent and reflect a changing student environment that is a cross between subjects requiring labs and in-person attendance combined with internet-based classes taken at home.

Today, college tuition is out of whack similar to the health industry. There are certain sectors of the economy that should not be driven by maximized profit. Given the fact that there are too many college students and the cost is astronomical, it is likely that elite universities and state universities may be all that survives. Yet again, smaller colleges could redefine their purpose toward two-year programs. The honing of one’s civility will not be one.

Ancient Mariner

 

The Child Park

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Teresa Hanafin, a columnist for the Boston Globe, covered a report that talked about the increased anxiety resident in children today. The report believes it’s because of a fundamental shift in the way we view child-rearing, in which “the work of raising children, once seen as socially necessary labor benefiting the common good, is an isolated endeavor for all but the most well-off parents.” Parents who have to work are forced to “warehouse” their kids most of the day, and the pressure for success is paramount:

“School days are longer and more regimented. Kindergarten, which used to be focused on play, is now an academic training ground for the first grade. Young children are assigned homework even though numerous studies have found it harmful. STEM, standardized testing, and active-shooter drills have largely replaced recess, leisurely lunches, art, and music.” The kids’ resultant mental distress is overwhelming and dangerous.

 It is true that children need lots of unscheduled time with parents and family, other children and even alone time. The brain is not a computer; it is a bag of highly sophisticated chemicals and special cells. Just because society has continued to accelerate daily life since the early 1900s and looks forward to even more automatic features in future society, that doesn’t mean the brain physically modifies its learning requirements to match social acceleration. It is what it is and while it is learning and developing in young people (including teenagers), parents and society in general need to support not only data learning but must also personally invest time with children to develop their social and emotional skills and to allow time for the playground.

People have learned how important it is to their pet dogs when they take them to a dog park. We can do no less for children.

Ancient Mariner

Get Mr. Fixit

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A few days ago, mariner was reading a piece by Clare Malone who writes for fivethirtyeight.com. She was trying to describe the subtleties of this modern era of politics. She cited statistics that suggested US citizens have doubled in number when it comes to those who pay attention to politics on a daily basis; yet the number of citizens that actually participate physically in some manner, even if attending a school board meeting, remained at the same low level (about 12%). Claire also cited statistics that show the citizenry has very low levels of trust toward their government and is unhappy with the whole phenomenon. She alluded to the separation of politics and morality.

Mariner uses an allegory of a beloved automobile that was bought many, many years ago and has performed through wind and rain, hail, children and dogs, long trips, over stuffed during a number of house moves, two accidents, and still plods on. Today it looks rusty here and there; there are scratches and a dent or two; the driver’s window doesn’t open, the gearshift isn’t trustworthy and the steering wheel is way too loose – turns are a gamble. The vehicle still moves and provides transportation but it is clear the automobile is on borrowed time. It is time to restore it.

The government is like this automobile. As a democracy, it has survived civil war, several depressions and recessions, backroom politics and today it suffers mightily from the influence of money in all its forms – from job security for elected officials, to bribery, to pay to play financing, to dollar-controlled campaigning. The dollar has replaced morality not only in government but in business, classism and day-to-day life. In other words, morality has fallen by the wayside and the wellbeing of the state and its citizens is irrelevant. As Cuba Gooding said, “Show me the money!”

Fortunately, the US Constitution has established democracy as the repair garage. In fact, as social issues get tough – slavery, women’s suffrage, international wars and political diseases like Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump – it is the vote of the citizenry that fixes things.

Consider the following repairs:

Term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court

Elimination of the Electoral College

Independent assignment of districts based on the census

Restructure the Senate to represent the population

Federally controlled/funding of US elections including caps and contributions only from related jurisdictions

Use technology to allow voting at convenient places and times

Automatic registration at age 18

Create a national referendum that, among many issues, will let the citizenry decide policy on guns

Is the voter’s mechanic (candidate) willing to fix these parts?

UNNOTICED NEWS

֎ [Science Magazine] The United States is experiencing a public health epidemic of mass shootings and other forms of gun violence. A convenient response seems to be blaming mental illness; after all, “who in their right mind would do this?” This is utterly wrong. Mental illnesses, certainly severe mental illnesses, are not the major cause of mass shootings. It also is dangerously stigmatizing to people who suffer from these devastating disorders and can subject them to inappropriate restrictions.

According to the National Council for Behavioral Health, the best estimates are that individuals with mental illnesses are responsible for less than 4% of all violent crimes in the United States, and less than a third of people who commit mass shootings are diagnosably mentally ill. Moreover, a large majority of individuals with mental illnesses are not at high risk for committing violent acts. Continuing to blame mental illness distracts from finding the real causes of mass shootings and addressing them directly.

 ֎ [Politico] RUSSIA SANCTION VOTE UNDER SCRUTINY — Earlier this year as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell helped kill an effort to keep painful U.S. sanctions on a Russian aluminum giant, a business deal was brewing in his home state that needed those sanctions gone. A key businessman in Kentucky was courting a Russian investor — Rusal, the Russian aluminum producer — at the same time McConnell was blocking a Democratic-led attempt to maintain those sanctions, the Washington Post reports. Three months later, Rusal and the Kentucky company unveiled plans for a major new partnership.

֎ [USA Today] 300 MILES AWAY – Following wildfires there last month, rare lightning has also recently struck the Arctic. Thunderstorms require air that’s, like, warm. Yet multiple lightning strikes were detected “within 300 miles of the North Pole,” according to the National Weather Service. “This is one of the furthest north lightning strikes in Alaska forecaster memory,” the NWS said.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

The Democratic Hoard + 1

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Mariner suspects many voters, like him, have no affinity toward any of the twenty-some democratic candidates. It is a montage for sure. Trevor Noah (Daily Show) presents a bust shot of all the candidates in a single rectangular frame; look closely and one sees a cartoon figure in the last bust shot at the bottom. Indeed. All of them are caricatures of something. In his heart, mariner sees no outstanding, Herculean, Donald-proof candidate. A new candidate is becoming noticed: Tom Steyer.

The good and bad thing about Tom Steyer is that he is worth 1.6 billion dollars. If nothing else, Donald’s bluff about his own wealth and business acumen may not be useful running against a candidate worth ten times as much. Another good thing is that Tom is not a career politician; he lacks the cartoonishness of the democratic hoard.

Interestingly, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) isn’t fond of him and wishes he wouldn’t run for President. If Tom Steyer wins, it can be said that he bought the Presidency; in the future any old billionaire can decide he wants to be president and outspend the opposition. In these times of big money elections, it is still the same but no one who typically runs for office is a billionaire. Billionaires would rather pull the strings behind the curtains – which is no better than one billionaire deciding to step out and run on their own. Truth is, the US is pretty much a plutocracy already.

But Tom puts the electorate on the horns of a dilemma: On the one hand, no one should be able to buy the Presidency – maybe a bunch of party people with a bunch of money – just not one person. On the other hand, Tom has a stellar record as a business man, a liberal philanthropist, an advocate of taking on climate change, and a stated policy that resets taxation and minimum wage. On paper, he is the perfect democratic candidate; not only that, he will intimidate Donald just by showing Donald his checkbook.

To increase a democratic voter’s agony, mariner provides a bit of bio:

Thomas Fahr “Tom” Steyer is an American hedge fund manager, politician, philanthropist, and environmentalist. Steyer is the founder and former Co-Senior Managing Partner of Farallon Capital Management, LLC and the co-founder of Beneficial State Bank.

Tom Steyer was born in 1957 in Manhattan. His mother, Marnie (née Fahr), was a teacher of remedial reading at the Brooklyn House of Detention, and his father, Roy Henry Steyer, was a partner in the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, and was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. His father was Jewish, and his mother was Episcopalian.

Steyer attended the Buckley School and Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated from Yale University summa cum laude in economics and political science, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was captain of the Yale College soccer team. Steyer received his MBA from Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. He has served on the Stanford University Board of Trustees.

In August 2010, Steyer and his wife joined Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and 37 other American billionaires in pledging to give away at least half their fortunes to worthwhile causes. Business people “are pretty widely mistrusted and seen as overwhelmingly self-interested,” Steyer said. “The point is that business people are not just laboring for themselves. They have bigger responsibilities and belong to a wider community.”

In 2013, Steyer founded NextGen Climate (now NextGen America), an environmental advocacy nonprofit and political action committee. Steyer’s platform emphasizes fighting climate change and structural political reforms such as term limits for members of Congress and creating a national referendum process. Steyer has also been a prominent advocate of impeaching President Donald Trump.

Steyer has been the single biggest donor in disclosed political giving over the 2014-2018 election cycles, spending $245 million dollars over that time span, all to help Democrats. (Though it’s possible that other rich people spent more in undisclosed “dark money.”)

A near perfect remedy to Donald’s abusive shenanigans. But – should one person singlehandedly be able to dominate the airwaves, campaign machinery and beholding to no one – and be our President?

Oh, the agony. Mariner would vote for a dead goldfish over Donald but there are principles. Oh, the agony.

Ancient Mariner

 

On Reading

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When mariner was just beginning his elementary school years, he began reading the family library. It consisted of about ten or twelve popular novels and a 1939 Book of Knowledge encyclopedia; the encyclopedia still is in his possession. The novels were best sellers and classics of their time but alas, over the years mariner has forgotten the titles. He does remember not having the patience, and perhaps the maturity, to finish the novels. However, he did, believe it or not, read page by page all nineteen volumes of the encyclopedia (the twentieth volume is an appendix).

Mariner more or less avoided reading fiction until high school – except for the beloved Sunday comic strips and comic books. In high school there were classes that existed only to read fiction. Books like Old Man and the Sea and (horrors) Heart of Darkness. In college mariner discovered fiction ponies called Cliff’s Notes; these helped his experience in those ‘fiction’ classes.

Not that mariner was illiterate or indifferent about knowledge and information. Mariner was the kid who would cut school and spend the day at the public library (not the fiction section). Later in life, after mariner was married, he decided to enroll in a Master Degree program. He knew his weakness for reading and his impatience while waiting for information to emerge. He asked his wife, an ardent reader, if she would read his textbooks for him. Succinctly, with a tone of disgust, she said, “No.”

So mariner had no choice but to learn to read very, very fast. He enrolled in Evelyn Woods’ speed reading program. Mariner must say up front it is a remarkable training program with excellent improvement in reading something extremely fast. Mariner’s words per minute tripled. The sensation of eliminating subvocalizing is a memorable experience. One feels as if they are in a plane lifting off the runway and soaring.

But mariner did not take Evelyn’s classes to read more fiction. In a manner of speaking, he wanted to avoid reading. The class he took to heart was the class about how to read nonfiction!

Mariner was able to dissect a textbook or treatise in a fraction of the time by not reading all the words! Specifically, one memorized the primary table of contents, skimmed through the preface, and then studied the author’s writing style. It turns out most writers habitually use one of three sentence locations within a paragraph to state the specific point or information for the whole paragraph. Most nonfiction writers use the first sentence of the paragraph to state the primary point. Second most popular is using the last sentence of the paragraph as a summation. A few writers set up the paragraph in the first sentence but don’t state the point until the second sentence. Combined with the top down thread of the table of contents, one can literally jump over chapters to sustain continuity. Don’t try this with math or engineering texts.

As the decades passed, mariner remained a reluctant reader unless there was a task at hand or a goal that required additional information or understanding. During his career, he often had to fly to different locations. Any traveler knows that hours in an airplane can be boring. One day mariner decided to try reading a novel.

At the airport bookstore he picked up Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger. On the plane, he started at the beginning. A story line developed and pieces of plot were linked around the person in the story. At the end of the first chapter, the novel started all over again with another person. The second chapter never referenced the first chapter! Hell, mariner doesn’t have time for this nonsense. He closed the book and has never looked at a novel since.

The same pattern emerges when mariner watches movies. His poor wife enjoys movies. Mariner notes the color schemes, the actors, the music and the pattern of camera shots. About fifteen minutes into the movie – to his wife’s chagrin – mariner says he has seen the movie.

Ancient Mariner

 

Some Items You May Find Interesting

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[Bloomberg] $70,000 per minute. That’s how much money the Walmart-owning Walton family has made in the year since Bloomberg’s previous list of the world’s richest families. The Waltons top that list this year, with wealth of $190.5 billion. The Mars, Koch, Al Saud and Wertheimer (of the Chanel fashion house) families round out a top five. The 25 richest families in the world control $1.4 trillion, a figure which is up nearly a quarter from last year.

[Endangered Species Coalition] The Trump Administration put rules in place today that will put many more species on a path to extinction.

  1. The Trump Extinction Plan removes protections for plants, fish, and wildlife designated as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.
  2. The Trump Extinction Plan encourages policy makers to calculate the perceived economic costs (but not the benefits) of Endangered Species Act protections to plants, fish, and wildlife . Under the Act, economic factors were intentionally not considered in listing decisions. Listing decisions should be based on science, not on money. This rule upends that.
  3. The Trump Extinction Plan makes protecting habitat much more burdensome despite habitat loss being a leading cause of extinction.

In finalizing their changes, the Trump Administration ignored more than one million activists that submitted public comments and rejected the advice of hundreds of scientists, biologists, and wildlife experts who oppose the changes.

[CityLab] The Online Gig Economy’s ‘Race to the Bottom.’ On digital work platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com, you can also buy nearly any service—often from someone halfway around the world, sometimes for just a few bucks. On Fiverr, one of the most popular of these platforms, you’ll find offers for someone who will write an e-book “on any topic”; a person who will perform “a Voiceover as Bernie Sanders”; someone who will write your Tinder profile for you, and someone who will design a logo for your real-estate company. The people selling this labor live in Nigeria, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Bangladesh, respectively. Each of them charges $5 for these tasks.

 There are members of mariner’s family who are at-home contractors (AKA gig workers). Will other nations drive down living wages for US citizens as these ‘gig’ services expand?

[Atlantic] And Then Job Said Unto the Lord: You Can’t Be Serious. God says to Satan, “You there, what have you been up to?” And Satan says, “Oh, you know, just hanging around, minding my own business.” And God says, “Well, take a look at my man Job over there. He worships me. He does exactly what I tell him. He thinks I’m the greatest.” “Job?” says Satan. “The rich, happy, healthy guy? The guy with 3,000 camels? Of course he does. You’ve given him everything. Take it all away from him, and I bet you he’ll curse you to your face.” And God says, “You’re on.”

That—give or take a couple of verses—is how it starts, the Book of Job. What a setup. The Trumplike deity; the shrewd and loitering adversary; the cruelly flippant wager; and the stooge, the cosmic straight man, Job, upon whose oblivious head the sky is about to fall.

Purchase the book – a rewrite of Job (Job: A New Translation by Edward L. Greenstein, Yale University Press) or see the article in the September Atlantic Magazine or check out:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/job-edward-l-greenstein/594769/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=video-series-editors-picks&utm_content=20190810&silverid-ref=NDkwMjIzMjA1Mjg2S0

Ancient Mariner

Love . . .

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(Tevye) Golde, Do you love me?

(Golde) Do I what?

(Tevye) Do you love me?

(Golde) Do I love you?

With our daughters getting married and this trouble in the town

You’re upset, you’re worn out go inside, go lie down!

Maybe it’s indigestion…

(Tevye) “Golde I’m asking you a question…” Do you love me?

(Golde) You’re a fool

(Tevye) “I know…”but do you love me?

(Golde) Do I love you? for twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked the cow; after twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?

(Tevye) Golde, The first time I met you was on our wedding day. I was scared

(Golde) I was shy

(Tevye) I was nervous

(Golde) So was I

(Tevye) But my father and my mother said we’d learn to love each other

And now I’m asking, Golde do you love me?

(Golde) I’m your wife

(Tevye) “I know…” But do you love me?

(Golde) Do I love him? For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him, fought him, starved with him. Twenty-five years my bed is his. If that’s not love, what is?

(Tevye) Then you love me?

(Golde) I suppose I do

(Tevye) And I suppose I love you too

(Both) It doesn’t change a thing but even so after twenty-five years it’s nice to know.

These lyrics are from that once in a lifetime play and movie “Fiddler on the Roof.” The reader may have noticed that their marriage was arranged rather than the result of courtship. Every song in that show related to emotional and social accountability that everyone must deal with as life moves along. In his thirties at the time, “Do You Love Me” provided mariner with a more complex definition of love. Love is a formula rather than a singular experience. Briefly, one can name several distinct types of love: a child for its mother; a parent for their children; infatuation; an employee for their job, etc. There are esoteric forms of love: for country; for nature; for the sea; for a sport, etc.

If one could divide love in a pie chart, commitment by far would be the largest piece. Different disciplines use different words for commitment; ponder ‘sacrifice’ for example: Is there a difference between a soldier diving on a grenade to save his squad and Golde spending 25 years sacrificing for her family? Vastly different circumstances but the common denominator is commitment.

The next largest piece would be empathy. It takes empathy to ‘bond’ with someone. Being able to perceive reality from another point of view whether it’s a life partner, a pet or someone on the street is a mental capability that is not evenly available among humans. Most arguments about lack of empathy center on bad developmental experiences when young or the fact that each human brain is as unique as fingerprints.

The third-sized piece is a stable psyche. A synonym for psyche is ‘spirit.’ There’s a trope that says “You have to love yourself before you can love someone else.” A tale from mariner’s life is his prejudice against tennis players who wear their ball cap backwards. He claims he doesn’t want to be distracted by their troubled psyche. Hmm, does mariner have an empathy problem or his own psyche issue?

The last of the larger pieces in love’s pie chart is gratification. Personal reward. That super feel good experience that makes one glad they are who they are; they feel complete; they feel successful. Importantly, there’s only one way to feel gratification: by an act of commitment empathetic to another’s need that grows one’s psyche and is successful in its objectives.

“Love makes the world go ’round” so says the 1961 play “Carnival.”

Ancient Mariner

REPRINT!!

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Danger Ahead

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If there is any strength the US has to stand up against a hostile world, it is the US Intelligence Service. Coupled with the best funded military in the world, other nations think twice about taking on the US mano-a-mano.

In this most serious sector of US policy, Donald is showing his disregard for US security in favor of money schemes and showing his incompetence as a Commander-in-Chief.

This is beyond political rhetoric, beyond the politics of ‘the base’, beyond the dysfunctional condition of Congress. Donald is, in a seriously inept way, playing with the security of the US – a monkey with keys to the vault. He has no regard for anything that does not add wealth to his pocket. Under his leadership, the subtleties of international relationships are irrelevant.

Unfortunately, there is no Congress to take him to task. The electorate must suffer through an ever increasing dismantle of the US image and its authority. The electorate must endure to the election. The nation is at risk in a way that has not existed since the Second World War.

Ignore the ‘base’; ignore the do-nothing-Congress; ignore the true conflict surrounding the loss of jobs under Reaganism – the security of the US is at stake.

Ancient Mariner